Structuralists ”believe there are two kinds of people in the world” to use a joke.
People make sense of the world by seperating two kinds of phenomena, eg. divine v. profane, clean v. dirty. Etc.
there is a kind of opposite-based mode of thinking of humans, and this study is structuralism.
Structuralism is the backbone of postwar French thought.
Saussure, never used the word structuralism, yet is considered the father of the movement.
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Not a philosopher.
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Tries to figure out a way of doing linguistics based on signs.
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Quite accessible.
Saussure lived 1857-1913, b. In Geneva.
Trained as a linguist, and worked in Geneva.
Published very little.
There is really only one work in translation, Course in General Linguistics
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This is a work of student notes published after his death.
His project was to create a theory of language and linguistic signs.
His method has been developed further into very many different kinds of thinking. His method is usually taken out of his work and applied to other sciences, like anthropology, phenomenology etc.
The Russian formalists and the Prague Linguistic circle initially discover Saussure in 1928 and have a congress in the Hague.
Jakobson (jewish and thus forced to leave Europe), a person from these circles, met and influenced Claude Levi-Strauss in 1942
Thus Levi-Strauss brought structuralism back to France to Merleau-Ponty, Lacan etc.
”The heart of his demonstration is to establish the arbitrariness of the sign, showing that language is a system of values established neither by content nor by experience, but by pure difference”
Language vs. Speech.
Unlike other fields, the object of the study of language eludes us. Language is something you know when you see it, but we can’t clearly define it.
Thus, what is the object of language?
Saussure tries to define language in a way that ”has two related sides”, it is a dichotomous defintion. But he uses multiple dichotomies.
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Accoustic vs Articulative.
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Sound vs Idea.
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individual vs. Social
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Static vs. Mobile.
Saussure thinks that we will run into problems if we only look at things from one side. We must recognise the duality of phenomena related to linguistics in order to make sense of it.
eg. If you only study the sound of a language, it will not make sense, but if we focus only on the ideas we are perhaps only studying something akin to philosophy.
The most important: Language (Langue) vs. Speech (Parole).
The fundamental distinction between the two consist of language as a social institution and Speech as the individual acts of speaking, instantiations of language. Thus we have a clear structure about which comes before the other. Language is public, whilst Speech is indiviudal.
Linguistic phenomena can be called the union of both Language and Speech.
Speech is inferior to the general system of language.
Articulation, something Saussure doesn’t mention all too much, but says it relates to humanity’s fundamental ability to construct language out of anything.
What is articulation’s relation to the Langue-Parole distinction?
Articulation: not analysis of language into morphemes, articulation is yet more theoretical. Articulation (means division) brings difference. A toddler cannot articulate a phrase, because they confuse the different words of a sentence, they create only a mass of sounds. Articulation means more or less to divide the amorphous mass of sounds into words. To cut phrases into meaningful parts. To mould this amorphous flow of sound into contrastingly meaningful parts. Language intervenes in the articulative level of speech by supplying an identifiable contrastable sound-images (not just sound, but institutionalised sound-images). Articulation happens when furnishing different parts.
Signs are not and do not have to be connected into a sentence for it to be a sign. They are only contrasted to other signs. When you have ”iam”, and form it into ”I am” you divide, and then connect. Division of sounds, and connection of meaning.
Semiology (semiotics):
A science of signs.
”Science that studies the life of signs within society”.
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Semiology is not semantics, which studies changes in meaning and which Saussure did not treat methodically.
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Semiology opposes the defnition of language as a ”name-giving system”, ie. It is not nomenclature.
It is more general than linguistics, linguistics is only a part of semiology.
Language better than anything else, offers a basis for understanding the semiological problem.
Structuralism later however completely change these premises.
eg. Levi-Strauss
2 → 2. Semiology opposes the definition of language as a system of anthropology.
or. Roland Barthes
2 → 2. Semiology is a part of linguistics rather than the other way around, only in relation to discourse however.
From the presentation
Sign, Signified and Signifier.
Sign is the union between signifier and the signified. The signified is a mental image of the Sign whilst the signifier can be a phrase relating to a sign.
They are not tied down by meanings, but by linguistic groups. At least the signifier works like that. Signs can potentially transcend such borders.
Saussure, discusses the linguistic unit as a double entity, which goes through a psychological process, which is entirely arbitrary. The relationship between the 3 are entirely arbitrary.
Provide the foundations for how language functions, shaped by human interaction.
eg. ”stone” bears no inherent similarity to the signified, but is still its signifier.
It is wrong to use the word ”symbol” interchangably with a signifier. They are not equal.
A symbol may not be arbitrary, because the things which the symbol composes usually bear similarities to the signified they portray.
The linear nature of the signifier:
signifiers unfolds only through time and no other dimension.
A signifier can be understood in many dimensions, however they are always actually understood in a chain.
The relationship between signifier and signified is immutable, despite being arbitrary:
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arbitraryness protects it from change
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it is impossible to formulate a reasonable discussion based on changing the relationship.
→ It makes no sense to discuss the changing of terms, because it does not matter.
Language is always a heritage from the preceeding generations, but the sign is also arbitrary, so it is arbitrary arbitraryness.
Because signs are abitrary, they can however be changed due to basically nothing, thus they are both mutable and immutable. Immutable because no one wants to change them, but mutable if someone wanted to.
Holy hell Saussure is boring.
The signifier communicates the signified.
What is the signifigance of this?
Signs are established by pure difference!
Both thought and sound flow, and articulation cuts them into pieces and thus link them together.
Arbitrariness presents itself in the act of articulation. There is no reason why some sound needs to represent a part in the flow of my thought.
Arbitrariness gives rise to a semilogoical autarky, because they do not depend on the objective world.
The signifier becomes independent of the signified. There are such things as empty signifiers, eg in Lacan.
”What we have learned from Saussure is that, taken singly, signs do not signify anything, and that each one of the m does not so much express as meaning as mark a divergence of meaning betweeen itself and other signs. Since the same can be said for all other signs, we may concclude that language is made of differences without terms; or more exactly, that the terms of language are engendered only by the differences which appear among them.”
- Mearleau-Ponty.
We define things in perpetual deference, and not referens.